The Metal Heart
by whysosiriusblack45
Summary: He was a machine. And he could feel what i felt. Pain... set in the first three movies, not really counting the fourth in this... ON HIATUS


This story comes after Judgment Day in Terminator: Rise of the Machines. But I have changed some facts around, like the fact that when Skynet first sent Arnold Schwartzy and Kyle Reese back in time, the Resistance had won. I tried to stay true to as many events as possible, but if I wanted my story to work, I had to change some things, sorry. This story does not contain any information from T4, seeing as I haven't even seen it yet.

just so y'all know, i be a new writer, so pleez dont bash the fact that i dont really know what i'm talking about. just pleez be nicee peeplez... :(

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My name is Abigail Ryder. I am part of the Resistance.

Before Judgment Day, I had been a 20 year old cybernetics scientist, working on Skynet to improve the future. But the government didn't like the ideas I had proposed about making machines feel like humans do, and I was fired from my job. I took off just a few days before Judgment Day, and I made it to New Mexico, then the bombs fell. I didn't know what was going on, but I found a cave in the mountains and I waited. Lucky for me, I was outside the blast radius. I was also in an uninhabited part of New Mexico, and the terminators only made one sweep looking for survivors. I hid from them; I lived to fight another day. I waited in there for a day or two, and then I started trekking to anywhere I might find life. I found an abandoned, shot up gas station with food and a radio. I spent a month and a half there.

Then John Connor found me; he and his wife Kate made contact with me. I heard them over the radio, speaking of a Resistance. They said they were trying to contact anyone who survived Judgment Day; they needed doctors and weapons. He said to find them in a fallout shelter in California, called Crystal Peak. I took as much food as I could carry, along with a map and a compass I had found. I traveled by night, but I never ever crossed any terminators. I knew about them by now, John had explained what had happened, and what the terminators were. I was out of food three days before I reached Crystal Peak, but somehow I made it. They took me in, and with the rest of the survivors, we learned how to fight, how to live in this hell. John gave me the job of fixing weapons and making forms of technology that could help us win.

It's been three years. We've been fighting for a long time, but John says that we have a ways to go before we win. He says that we win, but I can barely see it, any hope at all. I have fought beside men and women who had become my friends, but most of them had been terminated. With their deaths on my mind, I worked with a new passion to improve our weapons, and I was inspired to create a new form of weapon, one that I had suggested to the government all those years ago. A weapon that could make a terminator feel like a human does, make them feel pain. And if they feel pain, they could be slowed down enough to make them much easier to kill. They wouldn't be nearly as vulnerable as humans, but they could be stopped more easily.

I worked tirelessly day and night, experimenting on dead terminator skeletons that the Resistance had stolen. I learned so much from studying their forms, their "brains" as you could call it. The terminators have a CPU in their head, and it can be set from being a read-only CPU to a learning and changing CPU. John told me this, but he wouldn't tell me how he found out. I was curious, but I respect John enough to let him keep his secrets. This bit of information saved me weeks and weeks of trying to figure out how to get into a terminator's head. What I did was take out the CPU, and study it. I took it apart to pieces, learning how it worked and what exactly Skynet had programmed the CPU to do. Using a computer that I had forged myself, I made an edit to the code running through the CPU, which basically would change the terminator from processing what pain and feeling is, to short-circuiting the cybernetic nerve endings, which the terminators would feel as pain. But this would only work if the pin switch was set to learning and changing, not read-only. After a year of research, I almost had it figured out, now I just needed to transfer that technology into a gun of some sort to shoot at the terminators, and when it hit them, their CPUs would be reprogrammed to feel.

I was in my makeshift lab in the deepest part of the rebel base, trying to think of a way to make a ray-gun that if it hit any part of the terminator's body, would centralize its corruption to the CPU, when one of my few surviving friends slammed open the door, scaring me half to death.

"Kyle Jacob Reese!" I growled at him. "You nearly gave me a heart attack!"

"It was not my intention, Abigail, I assure you," he grinned at me.

"To what do I owe this pleasure?" I asked sarcastically, returning back to my work.

"Actually, I came to tell you about something quite serious," he said, his face turning grim suddenly.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Remember when the Resistance captured the lab complex last week?" he said.

"Yeah, it gave me a lot of new information that's helping my research tremendously."

"They found time displacement equipment."

"Meaning?"

"They found a way to travel through time."

"…"

"Abigail?" he asked. My mind was whirring through all the endless openings this discovery could bring, and I didn't really hear Kyle until he said my name again.

"Hm?" I asked.

"A terminator has been sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor."

"What?" I said. "John has to stop it! What are we going to do?"

"John is going to send someone back in time to protect her."

"Do you know who it's going to be?"

"I volunteered." Silence. And then,

"Oh, Kyle…" I said, standing up. "Why? You're one of the best soldiers we have! How could you leave right now?!"

"I'm one of the most suited people to protect Sarah because I'm one of the best soldiers. If I don't save her, then the Resistance won't ever exist…"

"There's something else? Isn't there?" I asked. "Some other reason that you're going, and you won't tell me. We're best friends, after all this time, you still won't trust me!"

"It's just, well… Abigail, I _want_ to go."

"But why?" I asked. He turned away from me. Then suddenly, it all made sense. The determination, the adoration, the picture John had given him.

"You're in love with her, aren't you?" I asked. Long silence.

"Yes," Kyle said.

"Of all the women to pick, you had to pick the mother of the future, who happens to be at least forty years older than you, and dead!"

"Falling in love isn't something you can control!" he said. I sighed in defeat.

"I know, I know…" I said. "I'm going to miss you, buddy." I pulled him into a hug.

"There's one more thing," Kyle said. "I won't be coming back, Abigail. Once you're sent through time, you can't come back. They tried and experimented. If I survive this mission, today, right here and now will be the last time you'll see me. I'm leaving now." A tear slid down my cheek.

"Be safe, Kylie," I said. "Don't you ever forget me. You were a great friend."

"As were you, Abby," he said, a small sad smile played across his lips.

"Now," I said straightening up and wiping away the tears, "go kick some terminator ass!"He gave a half hearted grin, and then walked out the door, closing it behind him. That was the last I ever saw of Kyle Reese, who John Connor later revealed to be his father, and the Father of the Future.

Two long years have passed since then. I miss my friend terribly, but he took his place in history, and I couldn't be more proud of him. Over the years I figured out how to form my research into a hand held pistol that shot an electromagnetic bullet at a terminator and made it malfunction and die. But I still couldn't figure out how to convert the "Metal Heart" as I called it, into a weapon. Actually, I don't really know if it works or not, for I've never tested it before. I needed a live terminator to test it on, but John wouldn't let me risk the destruction of the captured terminator we had obtained to test it on. He made me reprogram its mission, which was easy enough. It was made to protect John Connor and to follow his commands. I never saw head or tail of that terminator again. John said that he sent it back to the past to protect himself in his childhood from a terminator Skynet had sent back to kill him. I still needed a terminator for my experiment, to see if they can feel or not. I've also figured out how to make a terminator feel other emotions and feelings, not just pain. I had stumbled upon it accidentally while working on the pain part one day. When I was trying to figure out a code for pain, I found a code for love and compassion. But that seemed pointless to make a robot feel love after they had killed so many people. I still figured I shouldn't let information like that go to waste, so now I'm working on combining all of the emotions and feelings into one CPU. Trying to make a terminator feel pain, and a terminator to feel love or anger is completely different. One is a physical feeling; the other is a mental thing. But if my equation is right, then I could make them feel both pain and anger, pride, jealousy, compassion, love, curiosity, and fear. The mental equations are easier to figure out because once I discovered the equation that lets a cybernetic mind observe a scene and make decisions for itself, the feelings just come naturally, which also means I can insert an equation for a conscience of right and wrong. I need to test it though; I need to know if all my research has been for nothing or not.

One year has passed. John Connor is not dead. I was there when it almost happened. We had captured another T-101. It looked exactly as the one from a year ago did, seeing as they came off an assembly line. If John had hesitated one more second in pulling out his gun, he would be dead. I don't know why, but John trusted this terminator, and that had almost been his downfall. I've created a ray-gun for my personal use, to capture a terminator to experiment on. Instead of short-circuiting the terminator, it simply turns it off using electromagnetic waves, instead of frying its CPU beyond repair by using bullets. The less condensed waves didn't damage the terminator, just shut it down. John fought off the terminator, and I hit it with a blast of electromagnetic waves. It took three soldiers to move the thing to my lab. I immediately took out its CPU and reprogrammed it, so if my ray wore off, I wouldn't be killed by a fully functional cyborg. I put the CPU back into its head, and it shuddered to life. I stepped back out of instinct, as the terminator sat up. It turned its head side to side cataloging its surroundings. I had programmed it to follow my commands.

"T-100," I said, forcing myself to sound brave when there was a killing machine sitting not three feet from me. "Stand up."

He stood up.

"Um, stand on one leg."

He stood on one leg.

"Turn around."

He turned around.

"Lay back down on the table."

He lay back down on the table. Okay, now that the trials were through with, time to get down to the nerve wracking hard stuff.

"Stay still," I commanded, unscrewing the bolts in his head and taking out the CPU.

This is what all my years of research had led up to, this moment. Now it was time to see if what I wanted to be possible, would work. I worked tirelessly over the CPU, knowing that the slightest mistake in the Metal Heart code could create utter chaos. I took apart the entire CPU, scanning through my self-made computer to see which wire I should put where, or which microchip to remove or alter. I made sure to keep the command system of the CPU in perfect condition otherwise the terminator would go on a rampage. Finally after hours upon hours of work, I was finished. I held it up to the light to examine. Perfect.

"Let's pray to God this works," I said to myself inserting the CPU into the terminator's head. It shuddered to life. I held my breath, waiting for something to happen; he should be feeling pain from his head being cut open right about now.

"AHHH!" it roared thrashing around on the table. "MAKE IT STOP! MAKE IT STOP! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME! I AM A MACHINE! WHAT IS THIS!?" I breathed out a sigh of relief, it worked. It really worked.

"HEY!" I yelled, trying to get its attention. "Look at me!" But it began clawing at the back of it head, trying to get rid of the pain. It drew its hand away, upon learning that touching a wound makes it hurt more. It looked at its hand which was covered in blood.

"What have you done!?" it cried. "This is not in my database! What is happening to me! Why does the blood make my head like this!?"

"SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO ME!" I roared. It quieted. I quickly grabbed a shot of numbing medicine from the cabinet. "Now hold still, this will make it go away." I stuck the needle into the thin layer of skin covering his head, putting doses all around the circular skin patch I had cut out. The terminators muscles relaxed from the former tensed state. I sewed up its head again, screwing the bolts shut.

"Why did my system react that way?" it asked.

"That was pain," I said.

"I am a machine. Machines do not feel."

"I programmed your CPU to make you feel. Let me ask you something, T-100. Have you ever shot a human?"

"Yes."

"And did they writhe around on the ground in human pain."

"Yes."

"A bullet wound feels ten times worse than what you just felt. That's what dying feels like. I took a small incision of skin from your head, and you think that's bad? What about being stabbed, or having a bullet in your stomach. Listen to me, robot. I can make you feel pain. You've killed my friends, and if you upset me, I will torture you. And I guarantee that you pain will be a million times worse than it was just now. Understood?"

"Affirmative."

"Now, I programmed you with curiosity. But if you so much as move a muscle, I will rip your hair out, which hurts a lot, by the way," I threatened. Then I realized he was still programmed to take orders from me and obey them, only now he could question his commands. Damn curiosity. "Stay here," I ordered, shutting the door behind me.

"John!" I called, running through the labyrinth of hallways. "John!" I sped around the corner before bumping into the very man I wanted to see.

"Abigail, what is it?" he asked concernedly.

"It works! It really works!"

"What are you talking about?"

"He felt pain! I made a machine feel pain!"

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To be continued…


End file.
